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Linguistic Landscape: Online-First Articles

Unsettling vulnerability in the wake of violence

ORCID logo | Stockholm University
In this essay, I write about the multifaceted dimensions and reverberations of violence (Navaro et al., 2021b) of Russia’s war against Ukraine, spanning from 2014 to the present day. Drawing on previous studies of semiotic landscapes, which emphasize a relational approach to people and places (Peck et al., 2019), I analyze ethnographic materials in the form of field notes collected during research in Crimea in 2019. This is done to reflect on the character of the violence to which people and landscapes become exposed. Three analytical vignettes describe the remnants of violence, which take on various guises of Russia’s war and highlight the vulnerability of both people and landscapes. At the end of the essay, I propose approaching these processes poetically, and viewing them through the lens of mutual vulnerability — a concept that considers the relationality of vulnerability as a phenomenon, encompassing the vulnerability of both people and landscapes.
Keywords: Russian war, Ukraine, Crimea, annexation, mutual vulnerability, reverberations of violence, poetic writing
Article outline
  • 1.The soil is suffering
  • 2.Violent reverberations
  • 3.Mutual vulnerability
  • 4.Instead of an analysis
    • 4.1Entering Crimea: Violence residing in absences
    • 4.2Navigating the city: Exploring joyful violence
    • 4.3Ghosts outliving violence
  • 5.Concluding discussion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 16 December 2024
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ll.24024.vol
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